DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — The tale of Martin Truex Jr.’s Daytona Speedweeks trip still has a few chapters to be written. But however his season-opening race turns out, Truex has already told his most important story.
Truex’s byline graced The Players Tribune on Monday, documenting girlfriend Sherry Pollex’s fight with ovarian cancer and how it impacted their relationship. The 35-year-old driver’s heartfelt first-person account — titled “The Fight of Our Lives” — comes just weeks after Pollex completed a 17-month course of chemotherapy treatment.
With that stage of the fight behind them, Truex said the next logical step was to raise awareness to help others wage their own battle against cancer.
“She’s going to kind of be a spokesperson for the disease and she wants to help other people and spread the word about it and try to get more funding for research and all those type of things,” Truex said Tuesday at NASCAR Media Day, “So it was kind of a good time to get our story out there, explain how it went and kind of get the ball rolling on what we’re going to try and do as far as the awareness side and the research side about trying to help other women and other people with this disease.”
Truex established his foundation in 2007 to help combat children’s issues, specifically pediatric cancer. When Pollex was diagnosed with the disease in 2014, the Martin Truex Jr. Foundation expanded its reach to help women affected by ovarian cancer as well. The foundation’s annual Catwalk for a Cause helped raise more than $250,000 in contributions last year.
Truex’s article this week was an extension of the foundation’s goals, but it also helped to tell their story — both from her perspective and his.
“On my side of it, it’s about kind of teaching husbands and sons and just whoever from the man’s point of view on how to deal with it,” Truex said, “So we’ve kind of retooled our foundation a bit to focus on not only childhood cancer, which we’ve always done — pediatric cancer — but also now we’re going to put a lot of effort and emphasis in ovarian cancer, so all those things kind of go together and that timing was part of it.
“The rest was just — that was our story. That’s the story how it went for me and that’s how I wanted to get it out there.”
Truex joins the ranks of fellow NASCAR drivers Kyle Busch and Danica Patrick as contributors to The Players Tribune, which features content penned from a professional athlete’s point of view. Just 24 hours after his article’s publication, Truex said the reception has been overwhelmingly positive.
“I think that it hit home with a lot of people because a lot of people have unfortunately dealt with similar battles,” Truex said. “It just kind of shows what we’ve been through.”